Only after Adolphus Greely had directed his men to build their long bunk house at Fort Conger, when the long night of winter had descended on Lady Franklin Bay, did he direct the party to begin preparations for using the Peirce No. 1. Greely was a man who, much like Israel, was comfortable with data collection and precision instruments. He had overseen the creation of a vast telegraph network in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, becoming the Army’s top meteorologist. Perhaps this was a reason for the close bond that grew up between the two men. Greely identified a site on the north side of the house, a space sheltered under a canvas lean-to, where the pendulum could be placed. A party began digging the holes and pouring the Portland cement piers that would anchor the instrument. Digging frozen ground in the dark at -30°F wasn’t pleasant work and even Greely, not inclined to complain about conditions, described the process as “tedious and trying.” The men built an ice house around the pendulum frame to protect it from the elements and to stabilize its temperature. They placed a glass window with the wall in order for Israel to record measurements without entering the ice house. Only then did they remove the pendulum from its tin shroud and long wooden case. There, they hung it to swing in its dark, frigid chamber.[1]

Adolphus Greely

The delay in setting up the pendulum was deliberate. Peirce had recognized that the Arctic winter offered special advantages for pendulum use. The frozen ground firmed up the support of the concrete piers, reducing the flexure of the frame that might change the duration of the pendulum’s swing. In winter, the frigid Arctic air was very dry, reducing humidity that would deposit moisture on the pendulum, skewing its weight. Finally, the depth of winter would also bring greater consistency of temperature, important to limit any expansion or contraction of the metal itself.[2]

Yet for Israel, the difficult work was only beginning. The relative simplicity of the Peirce No. 1 belied the complexity of Peirce’s instructions. The Superintendent had given Israel a daunting list of requirements for the pendulum’s proper use. Israel needed to swing the pendulum within a very specific range of motion: not larger than 25/1000ths and not smaller than 5/1000ths of the arc radius. The pendulum had to be swung for ninety minutes, reversed, and swung again for thirty. This series needed to be repeated multiple times, so that the total time of pendulum measurements reached six hours a day.[3]

In addition to marking each swing over time, Israel had to record temperatures as well. Since the thermometer couldn’t touch the pendulum, Peirce directed Israel to set up thermometers near the top and the bottom of the instrument, making sure that each did not vary perceptibly from one another or over the time of the swing. Finally, Israel had to measure the flexure of the frame itself, which Peirce instructed, could not vary more than 1/200th of a millimeter. Although the glass window allowed Israel to measure each swing from the comfortable distance of the house, he still had to swing the pendulum, measure temperature, and look for microscopic flexures of the frame. In the end, Greely records that “for sixteen days in January 1882 he diligently swung Peirce Pendulum No. 1 in a specially constructed ice shelter.” After the sixteen-day series was complete, the pendulum was placed within its slender wood box and sealed once again in tin, to wait for its transport home with the party in the summer of 1882. The entire sequence of the pendulum experiment, from Peirce’s training to Israel’s execution had been meticulously planned and executed. For Greely and his party it represented a triumph of science over sensationalism, one that would contrast sharply and tragically with the catastrophe that followed.[4]

Cape Sabine, Ellesmere Island, 1884

The expedition that came to relieve the Greely Party at Fort Conger in 1882 was turned back by ice. Greely and his men, despondent at the lack of relief, overwintered for a second year and waited for the arrival of a second relief expedition in 1883. Yet this expedition, too, failed to reach Fort Conger, crushed by pack ice in the southern reaches of Smith Sound. As it became clear that the second expedition was not going to arrive in 1883, Greely made preparations to evacuate Fort Conger and travel south in small boats.[5]

The Greely Party Leaves Fort Conger, 1883. Credit: NOAA

The forced retreat created a dilemma for Greely and his men. It was crucial to return the pendulum to Washington so that it could be inspected and swung again by Peirce, confirming the measurements taken at Fort Conger. Yet the pendulum in its tin case and wooden crate added over forty kilograms of dead weight to an increasingly desperate escape effort.

Greely hoped to find stores near Cape Sabine left by the relief expeditions. Yet arriving at the southern reaches of Smith Sound, the party found few provisions. With little hope of finding more food, the party would now have to carry the pendulum as they dragged their boats over the pack ice. Greely took the issue to his men:

I informed the men that I was unwilling, much as I wanted to save that instrument, to lessen their chances of life by hauling it longer, unless all concurred, and that it would be dropped whenever they wished. Not only was there no objection to keeping it, but several of the party were outspoken in considering it unmanly to abandon it. Such a spirit is certainly most credible.’[6]

The men continued to carry the pendulum, stripping off the tin shroud to reduce weight. Eventually, they cached the Peirce No. 1 on Stalknecht Island, just off the shore of Cape Sabine. While it had functioned as a precision instrument in Washington and Fort Conger, the Peirce No. 1 now became a rescue beacon for relief ships entering Smith Sound, its long box anchored as a tower to the rock cairn to make it more visible, a note tucked within the rocks giving the party’s location on Cape Sabine.

During the winter and spring of 1884, the members of the Greely party slowly succumbed to starvation. On 27 May 1884, Israel began speaking quietly of home, his mother’s cooking. He became delirious and died. Greely, who shared a sleeping bag with Israel during their final desperate months, wrote that he “learned to love him like a brother.” When Greely conducted Israel’s burial, he edited the Christian service to make it consistent with the astronomer’s Jewish faith. Twenty four days after Israel died, a rescue party under the command of Winfield Schley arrived at Cape Sabine where they found Greely and six men close to death, the last survivors of the twenty-five men crew. Schley had expected to find Greely further north at Fort Conger, but his men saw the cairn on Stalknecht Island and went to investigate. There, they found the tall pendulum in its box, still projecting upwards from the rocks.

Washington D C., August, 1884

Thousands of well-wishers turned out in Portsmouth New Hampshire to welcome Greely and his men home. The day was filled with speeches and a parade of over two thousand. Speaking of the value of the expedition, Senator Eugene Hale of Maine told the crowds, “Nothing dims its record. There was no insubordination, no blundering, no losing of the head.” Hale’s remarks were premature. As he spoke, evidence was emerging that some members of the party had resorted to cannibalism in their final months at Cape Sabine. The press also discovered that the Greely party was riven by conflicts, especially during the long retreat from Fort Conger when Greely’s officers had almost relieved Greely of his command. As these discoveries swirled in the pages of the popular press, Greely defended himself, the bravery of the party, and the expedition’s commitment to science.[7]

Key to this defense was the party’s unanimous decision to carry the Peirce No. 1 out of the Arctic despite its weight. Greely chronicled this event in his final report, and it also appeared in the Coast Survey report as well as popular press accounts. As a result, the pendulum gained symbolic importance. It was at this moment, ironically, that Peirce began to question the instrument’s scientific value. He had measured the pendulum at the Coast Survey Building in late 1884 and observed that its length and mass had changed significantly since 1881. As a benchmark of Israel’s Arctic measurements, then, the pendulum seemed useless. Greely was furious, defending himself and Israel in a letter that he attached to Peirce’s report. Yet the long brass bar yielded results of a different kind. While it may have failed to measure the contours of the earth, in the eyes of many nineteenth-century Americans, it offered something more valuable in return: a measure of scientific spirit and manly character, one that protected Greely and the reputation of the expedition party in the decades to come.[8]

[This essay was published by the journal Endeavour in December 2012: 36(4):187-90]

[1] Greely quoted from Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881-1884 (New York, 1894) 1:119.

Peirce Pendulum at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. It is believed to be identical to the Peirce pendulum brought by Adolphus Greely into the Arctic. Photo courtesy of Dr. Geoffrey Clark.

Washington D.C., July 1881

Sargent Edward Israel arrived in Washington and made his way up Capitol Hill to the Coast Survey Building. He had an appointment with C.S. Peirce, Assistant at the Coast Survey, who would instruct Israel in the use of scientific instruments needed for the Greely Expedition, scheduled to depart for the Arctic in a few weeks. At twenty-two, Israel was the youngest member of the expedition. He had just finished his degree in astronomy at the University of Michigan where he had impressed faculty with his command of theoretical astronomy. He was comfortable with scientific equipment and well-prepared to do complicated calculations and reductions. Yet the biggest challenge that would face him on this expedition was in the gathering of data. His meeting with Peirce was not merely a lesson in how to use instruments, but how to use them in extreme conditions.[1]

Lt. Edward Israel, from Greely Expedition photo, 1881.

When the Greely Expedition built its station on Ellesmere Island at 81°N latitude, it would be the northernmost outpost in the world, and one of the most difficult places on earth to do science. One of twelve stations to be established during the International Polar Year (IPY) of 1881-1882, the American outpost would record – along with all of the other stations – a variety of terrestrial phenomena including tides, weather, temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure. The IPY was the brainchild of Austrian explorer, Karl Weyprecht, an attempt to redirect the energies of polar explorers away from flag planting and records of “Farthest North” towards something more substantial: a sustained and systematic program of Arctic research.[2]

When Israel arrived at the Coast Survey Building, he was met by Peirce. The two men descended into the basement and entered Room 6. There, anchored by concrete piers, suspended from a large trapezoidal frame hung a long brass bar, the Peirce Pendulum No. 1. Few people would have identified the object as a pendulum. It did not have a round weight or a thin arm. It was not an object one would find oscillating in the case of a grandfather clock. The Peirce No. 1 was unremarkable except for small projections, “knife edges,” that jutted out of the sides of bar near its top and bottom and allowed the pendulum to hang freely in its wooden frame.[3]

Peirce set the pendulum in motion, swinging it a few centimeters off center. The heavy bar, rocking back and forth on the slender pivot of its knife edges, swept out small, regular arcs. Israel did not record his impressions that day. He would not survive the expedition to write about it later. Perhaps his college experience with the instruments of astronomy, the telescopes that offered him spectacular views of planets and nebulae, made him jaded to the operations of the Peirce No. 1. Yet even someone less experienced with scientific instruments than Israel, some imaginary passer-by who found himself in Room 6 that day, would have struggled to find either drama or meaning in the Peirce No. 1’s slow monotonous motions. It appeared almost too simple to be useful.

Yet it was the monotony of this pendulum that gave it its power. Allowed to swing freely, a pendulum will repeat its journey back and forth in the same period of time, even as the height of its swing diminishes. It did not escape the attention of Galileo or other Renaissance scholars that the regularity of this motion offered a valuable way of measuring time itself. By the 1650s, the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens understood the movement of a pendulum well enough to describe it mathematically:

T = π√(l/g)

where the time (T) of the pendulum’s swing varies directly with its length (l) and indirectly with the force of gravity (g). Assuming that gravity remains constant, the most important variable determining the pendulum’s swing is the length of its arm. By lengthening or shortening this arm, the pendulum can be made to sweep out an arc of desired duration. After Huygens patented his first pendulum clock in 1657, clockmakers developed a “seconds pendulum” that offered a spectacular improvement in accuracy from earlier clocks, reducing error from fifteen minutes to fifteen seconds a day.[4]

Christiaan Huygens’s design for a pendulum clock, 1673.

By the 1700s, the pendulum had also found more esoteric uses. Since clockmakers had succeeded in showing that a swinging bob could be used as a measure of time, it stood to reason that that swinging bob, marked by increments of time, could be used as a measure of gravity. Gravity appeared to be remarkably stable over time, but was it also stable over distance? On a perfectly spherical earth, this should be the case since the distance between the surface and the earth’s center of mass would never vary. A distortion of the planetary sphere, however, would produce variations in gravity from place to place, ones that might be detectible by the swinging of a pendulum.[5] For this reason, in the 1730s, the French geodetic expeditions of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Charles Marie de La Condamine carried gravity pendulums with them to the polar and equatorial regions respectively, attempting to resolve a dispute between French geographer Jean-Dominique Cassini, who believed the earth was slightly egg-shaped, and Isaac Newton who was convinced it was squashed like a jelly-donut. The expeditions proved Newton right, but did not give enough data to describe to the shape of the geoid with precision.[6]

This was the objective of Israel and the Peirce No. 1: to determine the precise shape of the earth from the swinging of the pendulum. In so doing, it fit comfortably within the pendulum’s expanding role as an instrument of research, marking a procession of important instruments from Condamine’s pendulum in the 1700s to Foucault’s pendulum in the 1800s. Gradually the pendulum had evolved from a symbol of timekeeping to a symbol of science. As such, it conformed nicely to the broader objectives of the IPY: to reinvent Arctic exploration as something serious, scientific, and collaborative.

As the simple brass bar swung on its knife edges in Room 6, Peirce recorded the duration of its swings. The meeting had provided Israel with a tutorial in operating the pendulum, but it had offered Peirce something equally important: a series of measurements that he could compare with those made by Israel in the Arctic. As they concluded their meeting, Israel departed. In Room 6, the Peirce No. 1 was carefully packed in a long wooden case and sealed with tin. In the days that followed, it was shipped north with other expedition equipment to St. John’s Harbor, Newfoundland where it was stowed below deck on Greely’s expedition ship, Proteus. On 7 July, the ship set sail with the expedition party for Lady Franklin Bay, an inlet on the northeastern shore of Ellesmere Island, the northernmost island in the Arctic Archipelago.[7]

[This essay was published by the journal Endeavour in December 2012: 36(4):187-90]

[1] I want to thank Dr. Geoffrey Clark for his support in this project. I wrote about Greely’s pendulum briefly in The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), but he convinced me that this instrument was part of a larger story. He has also generously allowed me to use his photos of the Peirce pendulum for this essay.

[2] William Barr, The Expeditions of the First International Polar Year, 1882-83 (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary, 1985). The goals of the IPY did not prevent the Greely Expedition from also pursuing a record of “Farthest North.” Weyprecht’s ideals co-existed with nationalistic and adventurist interests in the Polar Regions.

[3] C.S. Peirce, “Pendulum Observations” in Report on the Proceedings of the United States Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay, Grinnell Land (Washington, DC.: Government Printing Office, 1888), 2: 701-714.

[4] The changing amplitude of a pendulum swing does have a small effect on its period, something that Huygens pointed out in his work Horologium Oscillatorium sive de motu pendulorum (1673); Matthew Bennett et al., “Huygens’ Clocks,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, (2002) A 458, 563–579; Victor Fritz Lenzen and Robert P. Multhauf, “Development of Gravity Pendulums in the 19th Century,” Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, Papers 34-44, On Science and Technology (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1966), 305-6, 324-330.

Would you climb an 8000-meter mountain? Descend in a submersible seven miles under the sea? Pilot a shuttle back to earth at 17,000mph? Most of us choose other paths. The astronaut who arcs around the earth every ninety minutes seems to trace out a life faster and wilder than ours down below, where we make the slow orbit from home to work and home again. It’s understandable, then, why we place explorers and adventurers in a category by themselves, honor them with statues, magazine covers, and tickertape parades. Those who take such risks, these travelers of the extreme, seem to shine with a different light. They do otherworldly things and appear, at times, born of other worlds themselves, brought up within the same towns perhaps, attending the same schools, but made alien through the crucible of perilous experience. Or, perhaps, they were alien to begin with, living among us, sharing our food and oxygen, but pushed by different winds, compelled like Icarus to fly towards the sun. We laugh at Tom Wolfe when he tells us that astronauts are made of the right stuff, but we believe him. Whether by nature or by experience, explorers seem set apart. They are different.

Shuttle Discovery Cockpit, STS 33, November 1989

If this is so, what makes them different? Is it their endurance of risk? Among modern day explorers and adventurers, astronauts experience the most risk. As they enter their spacecraft, they know that they have a one to two percent chance of not coming back. This is a much higher risk than piloting a commercial plane, hand gliding, or bungee jumping. Still, it is not beyond other earthly perils. Most astronauts only make one or two flights into space. Seen as a cumulative risk over the course of their careers, astronauts endure about the same odds of death as loggers and fishermen. Yet the dangers of exploding space craft, sinking ships, and falling trees are dwarfed by the perils of getting old, perhaps the riskiest human activity of all. Being 80 years old for six months carries with it twice the risk of death of suiting up for a flight on the space shuttle. If we value risk as a measure of mettle, then, we should be looking to verandas and nursing homes rather than the void of space.

This comparison falls short because it ignores the question of motive. Risk attends many things. We need to work. We cannot help getting old. But explorers and adventurers choose risk over safer pursuits, accept danger in their quest for something else. If risk, by itself, signifies little, risk freely accepted represents a conscious commitment. Yet commitment to what? Historically, explorers have offered many motives. The Arctic explorers of the International Polar Year (1882-1883) spoke of their desire to advance science. Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, and Richard Burton all pursued geographical discovery, suffering malarial fevers in their quest to find the source of the Nile. The Mercury Seven, who strapped themselves to the top of Atlas rockets, spoke of their commitment to patriotism, competing with the Soviet cosmonauts for the dominance of space.

Yet these are not the only motives that draw people to the extreme. For many, the goal of the journey is risk itself. Danger is not the cost of admission, but the feature attraction. Free-solo climbing, BASE jumping, and wingsuit flying are activities that do little to advance science, geography, or national pride. Yet for disciples of these sports, these activities offer the promise of exploring inner worlds: survey expeditions to map the contours of fear, endurance, and self-control. Risk is the object of these missions, the means of expanding consciousness, the catalyst of self-knowledge. If explorers and adventurers are unique, then, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes them unique. They are a diverse group, drawn to extreme experience for different reasons.

Woman Before the Rising Sun, Caspar David Friedrich, 1820.

It has always been this way. The oldest stories in human history — Exodus, Gilgamesh, and The Odyssey — are travel epics, stories of knowledge gained through hardship. Yet the nature of this knowledge has always been mixed, the lessons of the voyage open to multiple interpretations. If the extreme is an oracle that offers wisdom, it is one that speaks in riddles. Does the journey give us knowledge about the world, as the work of Pliny, John Mandeville, and Marco Polo suggest? Or does it function, as Plato, Siddhārtha Gautama, and St Francis seemed to think, as a way of gaining knowledge about oneself? In practice, these two motives for travel – worldly knowledge and self-knowledge – were never mutually exclusive. Three thousand years of travel literature have combined elements of both.

Yet by the 1800s, the idea of travel started to fray and come apart. Those who identified themselves as travelers could be grouped into a large category that encompassed every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation. As the concept of traveler lost definition in the eighteenth century, “explorer” entered the vernacular to delineate it, to distinguish the extreme traveler and scientific investigator from more quotidian voyagers, the doe-eyed ingénues of the Grand Tour. At the same time, artists of the Romantic Period, who worshipped nature as an untamable force, identified the essence of extreme travel, the force which pulled travelers towards waterfalls, cliffs, and active volcanoes. They called it “the Sublime.”

Our ideas about the extreme were forged in this historical moment. Since the 19th century, we have expected our explorers to be researchers, to bring back specimens and samples. Yet in truth, we pay little attention to their scientific work. (For example, can you name one scientific discovery made by astronauts on the moon?). Instead, we marvel at the experience of their journeys, their perilous escapes. We read books about Shackleton, the explosion on Apollo 13, and Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. We remain conflicted about the meaning of the extreme. We expect our astronauts to be astrophysicists, but we want to them to speak to us like Major Tom. Through their eyes, we see other worlds too.

Ernest Shackleton

Our attempts to define the limits of the extreme will always be fraught; not merely because the diversity of motives which draw people towards it, but because of our own mixed feelings about what it means. We read books about polar explorers, attend IMAX films about disasters on Mt. Everest. We watch YouTube videos about skydivers, cave divers, and BASE jumpers. We do this, not because we seek to place these people in a special category, but because we feel drawn to this category ourselves. We imagine ourselves on the razor’s edge, on the lip of the abyss, at the boundary of life and death, and marvel at it. Sitting in beach chairs near the life guard tower, we recognize the absurdity of our condition, reading Into Thin Air as we apply SPF 50 sunscreen, projecting ourselves on the slopes of Everest as we eat gluten-free snacks. We do so in spite of the incongruity between the lives we live and the lives we imagine. We suffer these ironies because the explorer still speaks to us. We read, we watch, and in doing this, we feel more alive.

“Beyond the Extreme” was originally published in the online arts journal Drunken Boat, volume 16, available here.

Jason Anthony knows about the cuisine in Antarctica. He spent eight seasons on the southern continent in the U.S Antarctica Program. In Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine, he uses this knowledge as a way of examining the culture and history of food in Antarctic exploration. It is a new approach to a topic that often considers heroism, flag planting, and sledging distances but not the stuff that most occupied the thoughts of polar explorers: food. Look for Hoosh in November when it comes out with University of Nebraska Press.

Excerpt from Hoosh, Chapter 4, “Meat and Melted Snow,” with the permission of Jason Anthony and University of Nebraska Press:

Early travel into interior Antarctica required a level of planning and austerity unsurpassed in exploration until humans ventured into space. When the men of the heroic age left their coastal huts to explore the hinterlands, they left behind the last vestige of ordinary life. No stockpiled crates of food, no fresh meat squawking outside the door; the continent offered only cold air to breathe and hard snow to melt. Sustenance was limited to what they could carry, and they could not carry much, because, paradoxically, the less food weight they carried the farther they could go. Up to a point. Robert Scott expressed the dilemma elegantly: “The issue is clear enough: one desires to provide a man each day with just sufficient food to keep up his strength, and not an ounce beyond.”

Terra Nova trail cuisine

Success in sledging depended on embracing the austerity with which Antarctica greeted these men. Sledging food had to be complete but also simple, concentrated, dehydrated, compressed, calculated, and packed tightly. Most expeditions brought pemmican, a perfect endurance food used by Native Americans for millennia, and converted it on the trail to “hoosh,” their stew of pemmican and melted snow, usually thickened with crushed biscuit. This was supplemented by a carbohydrate, usually biscuits, and often some modicum of sugar, caffeine, and dairy fat. Units of each were calculated in volume and weight and accumulated only up to the thin line between starvation and distance desired.

Antarctic sledging began with Frederick Cook teaching the craft to Roald Amundsen on the Belgica. On January 30, 1898, expedition leader Adrien de Gerlache, Cook, Amundsen, and two others undertook the first Antarctic sledge journey, climbing a short distance to a peak on Brabant Island and camping for seven days. Difficult weather confined them to a “sybaritic life” in the tent, wrote Gerlache, lounging amid “the aromas of cocoa or the good and cheering smell of pea soup.” Then, at the end of winter, Amundsen, Cook, and Lecointe undertook another short sledge journey toward an iceberg from the ice-trapped Belgica. Cook reports that in their quest for fresh meat Amundsen “was solemnly appointed chairman of the order of the penguin.” They tried eating some lousy Swiss soup mix, but threw it away in order to cook up penguin breast in the same pan. That was fine, but when they made hot chocolate in the pan, remnants of the soup and penguin made it “filth” to Lecointe. He had no idea how common such filth would become in Antarctic cuisine.

Despite these pleasant origins, Antarctic sledging was often a profound exercise in risk management. A balance had to be struck between sledging goals and the reality of starvation, between ambition and death. When dogs or ponies pulled the sledge, the burden was shared, while manhauling – when men stepped into harness – was one of the most strenuous human activities ever conceived. It was a sort of voluntary slave labor in the name of patriotism and knowledge, seeking glory in laying claim to the last great blank spot on the map. Their bleak journeys were often fed more with idealism than hoosh.

Shackleton’s Socks

Transport Management

In the tradition of nineteenth century European expeditions to remote areas of Africa, Asia, and the Arctic, some heroic-age expeditions brought beasts of burden to Antarctica that in hard times became meat for the hoosh. Ponies and dogs hauled and then became fodder. After his desperate experience on the ice, Douglas Mawson reasoned that “in an enterprise where human life is always at stake, it is only fair to put forward the consideration that the dogs represent a reserve of food in cases of extreme emergency.” Few things are as efficient on a life-or-death journey as the ability to eat your transportation.

Mostly this was a British affair. Of eighteen heroic-age expeditions, fifteen brought beasts of burden, but only six (four British, one Australian, one Norwegian) converted them into food. Scott’s Discovery expedition fed dogs to dogs as provisions dwindled. On Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, Siberian ponies pulled sledges full of supplies for his depots on the Ross Ice Shelf before their worn-out carcasses became supplies in the depots. Shackleton was careful to eat this fresh, heavy meat before the lightweight, concentrated pemmican they could carry farther. Sometimes they chewed raw cubes of it as they walked. “One point which struck us all,” Shackleton wrote later, “was how man’s attitude towards food alters as he goes South. At the beginning, a man might have been something of an epicure, but we found that before he got very far even raw horse-meat tasted very good.” Best of all, he said, was blood from a butchered pony frozen into an icy mass in the snow, which was then boiled to thicken the hoosh. Socks, Shackleton’s last pony, fell into a crevasse just hours before he was due to be shot and cut up for food. Shackleton later posited that “the loss of Socks, which represented so many pounds of meat,” might have cost them the Pole.

In Shackleton’s shadow, Scott returned in the Terra Nova to follow the same path to the Pole, using the same ill-suited ponies as transport. As the first five were shot along the trail, each made four or five meals for the dog teams. Scott reported that his men enjoyed the change too: “Tonight we had a sort of stew fry of pemmican and horseflesh and voted it the best hoosh we had ever had on a sledge journey.”

Sometimes it was extreme necessity that drove the men to eat the burdened beasts. Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz resorted to eating their dogs only when all other options had disappeared into a black crevasse. Shackleton’s Endurance tale makes it plain that once the disintegration of Weddell Sea ice forced them into crowded boats, there would be no place for their beloved dogs. Shackleton ordered them shot and eaten. It tasted “just like beef,” he said, “but, of course, very tough.”

The name most associated with eating domesticated animals in Antarctica is Roald Amundsen, whose slaughter of twenty four healthy dogs is infamous. Amundsen’s Butcher’s Shop, like Scott’s Shambles Camp, marked not just the end of these animals’ lives but also the place where carcasses were dressed for consumption. “Great masses of beautiful fresh, red meat, with quantities of the most tempting fat, lay spread over the snow,” wrote Amundsen, a hungry Norwegian epicure for whom the dogs’ corpses recalled “memories of dishes on which the cutlets were elegantly arranged side by side, with paper frills on the bones, and a neat pile of petit pois in the middle.”

The story here is neither of epicurean savagery nor even of human hunger, but of transport management. Amundsen, the most professional and shrewd of polar explorers, created a calculus of weights carried and weights consumed for every day of the roundtrip journey to the Pole. He related this to the pulling power of a dog – how many pounds on the sledge each dog could haul. As food and fuel were consumed, weight on the sledge diminished, and at a certain point that lost weight would equal a dog’s pulling power and the dog became superfluous. Amundsen then related “the average weight of edible flesh of a dog and its food value when eaten by the others. By these calculations,” he wrote, “I was able to lay out a schedule of dates upon which dog after dog would be converted from motive power into food.” In this analysis, some dogs were killed so others lived comfortably on the trail. After twenty four dogs were killed at the Butcher’s Shop and after the Norwegians had been to the Pole, six more were slaughtered, one at a time, so the surviving dogs actually gained weight on the return journey. The open question is how many more dogs might Amundsen have brought home safely had he not stuck to his calculation so firmly.

Polar Transport

Though Amundsen shows real affection for individual dogs throughout the story, he was a man on a mission. The animals were slaves to his cause, and so completely did Amundsen believe in that cause that he could write casually of their destruction: “I must admit that [the cutlets] would have lost nothing by being a little more tender, but one must not expect too much of a dog.” In fact, Amundsen expected everything of them, and he got it.

British Antarctica expedition at South Pole in 1912 standing near Roald Amundsen's tent. From left to right: Robert Scott, Titus Oates, Edward Wilson, and Edgar Evans. Credit: The Australian.

One hundred years ago this winter, two polar expeditions disembarked on the northern edges of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica with the goal of reaching the South Pole. One party, led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, reached 90º S on 14 December 1911. The second party, led by British officer Robert Falcon Scott, arrived a month later on 17 January 1912. Amundsen and his men returned to announce their victory, while Scott and his party of four men died on the trek back, succumbing to starvation and cold.

The meaning of Antarctic exploration has been cast in the forge of the Scott-Amundsen race ever since. There are good reasons for this. The event was significant geographically: representing the attempt to erase the last, substantive terra incognita from the modern world. It was also important politically: highlighting the competition between different Western powers on the eve of the Great War. For historians, it offered a way to demarcate the eras of exploration: signaling the key event in Antarctica’s “Heroic Age” and capping the end of a century of intense polar exploration. Lastly, it offered a great story: in the great race to the South Pole, writers have found heroes, villains, experts, and bumblers toiling on a landscape both severe and sublime.

Yet Scott and Amundsen were not the first to understand Antarctica’s power as a canvas of the imagination. Three hundred and forty years before Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced across Antarctica, this southern world filled the mind of Abraham Ortelius as he crafted his magisterial atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (The Theater of the World). Terra Australis, as Antarctica was then called, sprawled over the page of Ortelius’s world map. Its ragged coastline reached South America and brushed up against the shores of New Guinea and the Spice Islands. It was a polar continent, but it was also a tropical one, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn in the western Pacific to come within twenty degrees of the equator. Even accounting for the distortions of map projection, Terra Australis was a vast place, dwarfing the other continents of the world.

Abraham Ortelius's world map, published in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)

Despite its imposing form, however, Terra Australis was built on fragile empirical foundations, something that Ortelius knew when he published the atlas. The title page of Theatrum, which depicts the continents in allegorical form as goddesses, expresses his ambivalence about the southern continent. At the top of the page, Europe sits on her throne, while Asia and Africa, semi-clothed and semi-barbarous, stand beneath her. At the bottom of the page reclines America the cannibal, naked except for her loin cloth. Terra Australis stands next to her, a figure incompletely revealed in a block of marble, a continent glimpsed but still unknown.

Title Page, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)

In seeing explorers as sculptors, Ortelius was probably thinking about the sculptors of his day, artists like Michelangelo who had been moved by the spirit of Neo-Platonism and who saw it as their task to “liberate the figure imprisoned in marble.” From this perspective, the congruence between the artist and explorer was easy to see: they were both the messengers of objective truth, vectors of knowledge rather than its creators. Terra Australis waited for the explorer to chisel her out of the hard whiteness of high latitudes, revealing her true form to the world.

Terra Australis, Title Page (detail), Theatrum Orbis Terrarum

Yet Ortelius’s allegory of Antarctica carries different meanings today, a time when artists do not often describe their work as the liberation of perfect forms or pre-existing ideas, but as creative and subjective acts. If sculptors fashion their figures rather than reveal them, the half-rendered figure of Terra Australis has a different message. In order to bring this continent to life, the allegory suggests, the explorer must envision it and give it shape. Its storms, mountains, and coastlines – its very identity as a place – emerge as the vision of its creator, subject to ideas, expectations, and beliefs. The marble is not silent, of course. The continent of Antarctica, like every artistic medium, carries its own powerful agency (as Scott and his party would attest) imposing its own limits on the form revealed.

Had Ortelius been alive in 1912, the year of Scott and Amundsen’s great race to the South Pole, I suspect he would have felt the impulse to finish his Antarctic goddess, to give the continent her final unchanging and eternal form, installing her in his allegorical pantheon like a stone deity in the temple of Olympus. Yet the continent of Antarctica is not so fixed. While its coastlines and topography are now stable enough to secure within the pages of the modern Atlas, its meanings are not.

Here is an account of an era in U.S. exploration. You will probably be familiar with the details:

The United States finds victory in war, increasing its power and reputation on the global stage. Still it remains locked in competition with international rivals. One rival, in particular, has become adept at the geopolitics of exploration, boosting its international standing through dangerous, breathtaking expeditions that capture the world’s attention. Despite the success of the United States on the battlefield, then, it lags behind in the theater of discovery.

Eventually the President of the United States makes an appeal before Congress: the country should enter the expeditionary race for reasons of science, humanity, and national prestige. Yet before this goal is realized, he dies in office. The new course is set, however, and the resources of the federal government enjoined. American military personnel lead the first expeditions, albeit with considerable input from civilian and scientific agencies.

After early missteps, the United States becomes the world leader in this new theater of discovery. Its geopolitical rival bows out of the fight. Yet at its moment of triumph, America seems to lose its way. The ultimate goal is reached, but it struggles to find new missions at the frontier. Two missions end in disaster, leading to intense criticism of federal agencies by press and public. The scientific community grows restless too, frustrated with mission priorities that tilt towards heroism, politics, and flag-waving rather than basic research.

Eventually the United States government begins to ramp down its discovery missions, unable to justify the risks and expense to a public that has grown frustrated, and at times disinterested, in the project of exploration. Increasingly the mantle of exploration passes to wealthy individuals and private corporations.

If this seems like an account of the Space Age, it is really a history of the Polar Age, a period that witnessed intense U.S. exploration of the Arctic Regions from 1850 to 1910. Here are some extra details to the chronicle above:

When the United States defeated Mexico in the Mexican-American War in 1848, it gained territory, but still trailed other powers, particularly Britain, in international prestige. One way that Britain had gained this prestige was through geographical discovery – from the Pacific voyages of James Cook to the Arctic search for the Northwest Passage by James Ross, John Franklin, and others.

"The Great Race." Late 19th century cartoon of John Bull and Uncle Sam

Indeed, it was in sending an American expedition to search for John Franklin, who had gone missing in the late 1840s, that President Zachary Taylor hoped to include the United States in the project of Arctic exploration, an activity that had greater symbolic heft internationally than expeditions to the American West. Expeditions to find Franklin and explore the high Arctic met with broad support from elected officials, scientists, and the public, even after Taylor died suddenly in 1850.

The Search for Franklin. Published the 'Pictorial Chronicles of the Mighty Deep' 1880s. Credit: Science Photo Library

After explorers established Franklin’s tragic fate in the 1850s (he and his party on 129 men perished in 1848-1849), the goal of Arctic exploration shifted to geographical discovery, particularly the Polar Sea and the North Pole. Yet expeditions by George Washington DeLong (1879-81) and Adolphus Greely (1881-1884) resulted in the deaths of thirty-seven Americans. These catastrophes led to a great deal of soul searching by Congress, the press, geographical societies, and the general public. In particular, scientists had grown weary of supporting expeditions that returned very little in the way of usable data. By the early 1900s, then, the age of federally supported Arctic expeditions was over. The “Race to the Pole” relied entirely upon wealthy patrons, Arctic clubs, and commercial ventures.

The Loss of the Jeannette (under the command of George Washington DeLong) 1881

Why do I emphasize these parallels between Arctic exploration and space exploration? Because polar exploration offers a better analogy for the American space program today than the others regularly invoked by NASA and the space community. While astronauts are routinely compared to Columbus and Lewis and Clark, they are closer in roles to Elisha Kane, Robert Peary, and other explorers of the high Arctic. As much as space has been described as a New World and a New Frontier, it bears greater similarity to the Frozen North, not simply as an extreme environment but also as a geopolitical project, a subject I will take up in my next post.

On Monday 31 January, PBS will air a documentary called “The Greely Expedition” on American Experience. I served as an advisor on the project. Organized in conjunction with the first International Polar Year, the Greely Expedition was supposed to represent a new kind of Arctic exploration, one focused on international, collaborative science rather than pell mell dashes to the North Pole. In the end, however, the expedition signaled the end of serious collaboration between Arctic explorers and scientists for decades. Here’s an excerpt from my Greely chapter in The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture.

In June 1884, Commander Winfield Scott Schley cruised the waters of Smith Sound searching for Adolphus Greely and his missing party of American explorers. Greely had been in the Arctic for three years, establishing a scientific station at Lady Franklin Bay as a part of the International Polar Year. Two attempts to relieve Greely, in 1882 and 1883, had failed and Schley’s expedition represented the last reasonable chance of finding the Greely party alive. When one of Schley’s men discovered a note from Greely giving his location at Cape Sabine, Schley sent John Colwell and a small party to find him. Arriving at the site, Colwell found Greely along with six other emaciated men, survivors of the original party of twenty-five. In his narrative of the rescue, Schley described the scene:

Colwell crawled in [the tent] and took him by the hand, saying to him, “Greely, is this you?” “Yes,” said Greely in a faint, broken voice, hesitating and shuffling with his words, “Yes – seven of us left – here we are – dying – like men. Did what I came to do – beat the best record.” Then he fell back exhausted.[i]

"Rescuing Greely and His Comrades at Cape Sabine" by Albert Operti

Schley was not on the beach himself and relied upon the reports of his men to piece together events. Yet his narrative, published almost a year after the return of the survivors, soon gained authority as a true-life account of the dramatic rescue. The New York Herald excerpted it liberally in its reports about the expedition. Later reminiscences, such as Munsey’s Magazine’s 1895 account of the expedition, presented the scene exactly as it had appeared in Schley’s narrative. Even David L. Brainard, one of the seven survivors of the Greely party, used Schley’s dialogue word for word in his 1929 account of the expedition, as well as in a more candid narrative that he published in 1940. Yet others on the beach recalled the meeting differently. One member of the rescue party reported that Greely first asked him “if we were Englishmen.” Another remembers Greely chastising them. “If we’ve got to starve . . . we can starve without your help . . . we were dying peacefully until you came.” Maurice Connell, one of Greely’s men, was unconscious at the time of the rescue. Yet for him the published account of Greely’s words did not ring true. In the margins of Schley’s book he wrote: “‘Give us something to eat!’ more probably.”[ii]

Whether or not Greely, delirious and close to death, uttered his pithy remarks is unclear. What is clear is that the scene Schley described offered a far more respectable image of Greely and his party than the ones that circulated for months in the popular press upon Greely’s return. Immediately after the return of Schley’s rescue expedition, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other papers deluged readers with lurid stories about the Greely party’s demise on Cape Sabine. They uncovered Greely’s execution of a man for stealing food. They reported on rumors of cannibalism among the party and discussed charges by Greely’s men that he was inept as a commander. Schley’s account did not erase the impact of these revelations, but arriving in the wake of the reports, offered a means of capping the well of controversy, as its extensive use later suggests.

Adolphus Greely

The controversy that engulfed Greely after his return eclipsed his expedition’s scientific work. Billed as the most ambitious research mission ever sent into the Arctic, Greely’s expedition marked instead the end of serious collaboration between scientists and Arctic explorers in the nineteenth century. In the decades to follow, explorers occasionally promoted their voyages as research expeditions, but their words had little bearing upon their expeditions or campaigns. New patrons of Arctic exploration freed explorers from having to appeal to the scientific community to raise funds or lobby Congress. From the point of view of scientists, Greely and other explorers had abandoned their research missions in order to give allegiance to new masters, private patrons and press moguls who cared little about Arctic science. Schley’s account of the rescue only underscored the point. Greely declared to Colwell that he “did what I came to do – beat the best record,” but he had not entered the Arctic to do anything of the kind. In fact, organizers of the Greely expedition had hoped quite the opposite: that Greely and his men would turn their backs on dangerous and irrelevant dashes to the North Pole, focus on methodical research, and embrace the collaborative spirit of the International Polar Year. To his credit, Greely carried out much of this research at first, but he eventually turned his attention to the geographical dashes so disapproved of by international organizers. Greely’s words on Cape Sabine, true or apocryphal, only confirmed suspicions that science had also been a casualty of his expedition.

The claim that the Greely expedition marked the end of explorers’ serious collaboration with the scientists stands at odds with most historical accounts. Because Greely brought back the most comprehensive and systematic set of observations ever produced by Americans in the Arctic, historians have often held it up as a sign that U.S. scientific exploration had come of age. For historian of science A. Hunter Dupree, the Greely expedition “laid the groundwork for a really scientific interest in Arctic and Antarctic problems.”The wealth of data collected by Greely and his men has led William Barr to revisit the events of the expedition in hopes of illustrating its scientific importance. Expedition historian A. L. Todd agrees, calling Greely’s official narrative “one of the most important source books of arctic data available to the world of science.” Focused on quality of expedition data, however, these works leave unexamined the reactions of scientists, press, and public back home. Fixing our attention here, we see a different picture emerge: a diminished role for science in Arctic exploration, a waning collaboration between explorers and researchers, and a decline of scientific rhetoric in expeditionary campaigns.[iii]

The reasons for this change extend beyond the expedition. Greely and his rescuers may have sown the seeds of controversy by their actions in the Arctic, but these actions only bloomed into scandal because of important cultural and institutional changes back home. That science fell victim to scandal after Greely’s return reflected a new trend in newspaper journalism that put a premium on critical, often sensational, reporting. This was a far cry from the 1850s, when reporters generally avoided controversy in their attempts to portray Arctic explorers as American heroes. By the 1880s, however, writers proved far more willing, even eager, to expose expedition scandals even when it came at explorers’ expense.

The estrangement of explorers and scientists also grew out of changes in the patronage of Arctic exploration. Whereas Henry Grinnell had encouraged his explorers to campaign as a way of raising funds and creating broad coalitions among scientists and the public, the deep pockets of new patrons such as the New York Herald made such actions unnecessary. Flush with funds and backed by promotional power of their patrons, explorers had little need to campaign. Greely took his orders from the Army Signal Corps, not the popular press, but many of the effects were the same. With his expedition already organized and underwritten by the Corps, Greely felt no incentive to write, lecture, or rub elbows with scientists or other groups in the months before his departure. As a result, Greely established few of the personal bonds with scientists and others that had so benefitted Elisha Kane and helped to insulate him from his critics…

[i]. Two of the twenty-five members of the expedition were native Greenlanders, Jens Edward and Thorlip Frederick Christiansen. Quotation is from W. S. Schley, The Rescue of Greely (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 222.